Dead to Me (33 page)

“Are you kidding me?” Cassie asked, standing on her toes to get a better look.

Cy tried to put his arm around my shoulder as we watched, but I pushed it away and elbowed my way through the crowd of onlookers until I was standing next to the
Herald
reporter.

When I thanked Amos for saving us a spot, he said, “The least I can do. Thanks to you, I may never have to interview another insipid movie star again. Real news from here on out,
baby.”

“That’s great, Mr. Carey,” I said. “Are you interested in one more tip?”

I pulled him back from the others and whispered it in his ear. To him, it was just another story, but the words tasted like poison as they rolled off my tongue. If I’d had the slightest
doubt, I would have swallowed them down. I would have told myself to forget about them. But when I said them aloud, I knew they were the truth.

“You’re gold, Alice,” he said as we joined the others at the front of the crowd.

I didn’t feel like gold. I felt like I’d been gutted.

As I took my place between Cassie and Cy, I closed my eyes and remembered what I used to tell myself after Annie left home.

You are Philip Marlowe. You are Sam Spade. You are ice, you are stone, and nothing can touch you.

In an hour or a day, I would let myself feel this. I would hurt, I would be angry, and I wouldn’t do it alone. But until then, I needed those words. I needed to believe they were true. If
I didn’t, I knew I’d never be able to say what I had to say next.

Conrad Donahue did not go quietly. He called the policemen names and swore he’d have their badges as they read off the long list of charges: murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, assault.
He demanded the names of their commanding officers. He demanded his lawyer, the head of Insignia Pictures, and Nicky Gates. He demanded they leave him in peace, that he was in a great deal of pain
and needed his rest. Didn’t they know who he was?

In the end, someone brought up a wheelchair and they wheeled him out, still raving about the indignities that he’d suffered and how he’d make them all pay.

After it was over and the last of the reporters had trickled away, Cy squeezed my hand and said, “Would you care to accompany me downstairs to the hospital cafeteria for a slice of very
mediocre pie? My treat.”

I thought about the way he’d held me in my kitchen for as long as I’d needed him to, how he’d said I was pretty and brave. How he’d made me believe that when all this was
over, there might be something between us, something sweet and good that had nothing to do with the worst week of my life.

But there was never going to be an us.

I unwrapped Cy’s fingers from mine and turned to face him. It was a handsome face, the kind that looked nicer the longer you looked at it.

“What do you say, Alice?” he asked, grinning like he believed the pack of lies he’d told me and Jerry and everyone.

“I don’t think you’re going to like the way your picture comes out in the newspaper tomorrow morning,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

Had he actually thought he could make it up to Annie by helping me? Was that his way of atoning for what he’d done?

I leaned in close, pointing my finger so it stuck him in the clavicle.

“I’m talking about how you should leave. Now. Because in a few hours, Annie, Jerry, and everybody else is going to know exactly what you did.”

It wasn’t Ruth or Jerry or Millie who’d betrayed my sister. It was Cy.

Before the night he kidnapped me, Conrad had thought Annie was dead. And then, as we idled in front of County Hospital, he’d said:
“A little birdie told me that Annie Gates is
here.”

And earlier that same night, standing in the kitchen at Musso & Frank, I’d let it slip to Cy that Annie was still alive. I’d even been angry at Jerry for keeping the truth from
him.

By itself, that might have been a coincidence, but as I sat in Annie’s room, watching her and Cy compare notes, another question had tugged at me.

How had Rex found Gabrielle in the supply closet here at Cedars of Lebanon?
I’d wondered. It didn’t make sense. She was too smart to do anything that would give away her
hiding place, and nothing she’d done would have led Rex to believe she was anywhere near the hospital. There was no reason for him to go searching for Gabrielle at Cedars of Lebanon. Unless,
after insisting we split up, Cy had scoured every corner of County Hospital and found nothing. Unless he’d called Rex when he was done to tell him where I was looking.

All along the way, he’d been feeding Conrad and his cronies little bits of information, assuring them he was loyal, that he’d never rat them out for what he knew.

Annie was never supposed to be in MacArthur Park the night she was attacked. She was supposed to bring Gabrielle to Ruth, but then at the last minute, plans got changed. Someone told Annie to
bring Gabrielle to the park instead, someone she trusted. And there was only one person who could have made that call, only one person who could have told Conrad where Annie would be.

Millie hadn’t taken the pictures of Annie being beaten. It had been Cy who’d hidden in the bushes and watched the whole thing, snapping photographs he never intended to develop
unless whatever deal he’d made with Conrad fell through—in case he needed to blackmail him. It was smart of Cy to play both sides of it like that, to turn the camera over to Millie for
safekeeping, to distance himself from the evidence, knowing he could always go to Irma’s apartment and get it back if Conrad didn’t cooperate. No matter which way things turned out, he
should have gotten every little thing he wanted.

I remembered what the doctor at County Hospital had told me the morning I first arrived and saw my sister in that hospital bed. No one had called for help until later. Cy had left my sister for
dead, left her body for the maintenance man to find like a piece of trash on the dock.

Cassie and I walked back to Annie’s room together. Maybe I should have been dancing in the streets or cheering from the rooftop, but I guess I wasn’t really in a
cheering kind of mood. Cassie seemed to feel the same way. Still reeling from the double shock of seeing one of her film idols up close, then seeing him hauled away in handcuffs, she shuffled down
the hall in silence. I wondered how I was going to explain why Cy wasn’t with us, but when we got there, I realized it didn’t matter what I said. At that moment, nobody was going to
care what had happened to Cy.

Because, somehow, Gabrielle was there.

Jerry and my mother stood side by side at the foot of Annie’s bed, watching as Annie and Gabrielle wept and clung to each other like shipwreck victims in a lifeboat.

When she saw the look on my face, Cassie took me by the arm and dragged me out of the room. She led, and I floated along behind her down the hall, through the door, and into the stairwell. I
didn’t know how Gabrielle had gotten there, and I didn’t care. All I could think was that it shouldn’t have been Gabrielle crying in Annie’s arms. It should have been
me.

I was the one who needed my sister now.

I sat down on the steps, tears knotted in my throat. Why did everyone else get to see
that
Annie?

Cassie took a seat on the step next to me, her arms wrapped around her knobby athlete’s knees. It was hard to tell where her tan ended and her bruises began.

She’d known that I needed to get out of that room in a hurry, and she knew the reason.

“It’s probably easier for her with Gabrielle,” she said.

I took a deep breath and tried to swallow the knot of tears. It stuck there, and when I spoke, my words came out in a high-pitched, whiny whisper.

“Why?” I asked. “She’s known her a week. I’m her sister.”

“She didn’t leave Gabrielle behind. She didn’t run away from her. She didn’t let her down.”

“Then why doesn’t she say she’s sorry if she feels that way?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know it yet.”

“Cassie, what if she doesn’t love me anymore?”

Before I could get the sentence out, the knot in my throat loosened and filled my mouth with sobs. I buried my head in my lap and cried until the hem of my skirt was damp, while Cassie put her
arm around my shoulders.

“She still loves you, Alice.”

“What if she leaves? What if I lose her again?”

“Things go back to the way they were before,” she said. “Or they don’t.”

It was such a cold thing to say, so unlike Cassie. But she looked me in the eye when she said it, and her arm stayed wrapped around my shoulders.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, it’s up to you what happens. I hope she stays, Alice. I really do. But if she doesn’t, it can’t be like it was before. It doesn’t have anything to do with
whether we’re still friends or not. But if you want to sit alone in the dark waiting for her again, we won’t be.”

I hiccuped and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Cassie wouldn’t look at me while she talked, but it sounded like something she’d practiced saying before.

There weren’t many people who would cover for me, break into my house to make sure I was okay, guard my sister from thugs, and babysit my mother the way Cassie had. Especially not after
the way I’d treated her.

But she hadn’t dropped everything for me, either. Cassie had a life, a whole group of friends and things she did that had nothing to do with me. She wasn’t some pathetic sap, sitting
around waiting for me to need her.

“You’re such a good friend,” I said, breaking into fresh sobs.

Cassie pulled her arm off my shoulder and gave me a shove. It wasn’t very hard, but I hadn’t expected it and nearly slid off the step.

“Yeah, so what?” she asked with a smirk—the smirk of a girl who would probably make fur coats out of kelp and do bad movie star impersonations at the beach whether she was
twelve or twenty or forty.

“Cassie, can you forgive me?”

I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t important.

I
t’s amazing the things my mother can do when she’s sober. She can give fifty showgirls chignons that won’t shake loose during
the big song-and-dance number. She can arrange for the transfer of her comatose daughter to the most prestigious hospital in Los Angeles in the dead of night. She can actually be a halfway-decent
parent.

And she can get a ward of Juvenile Hall released into her custody. I don’t know what she said, what kind of stories she told, to make them turn Gabrielle over to her. All I know is no one
ever showed up to try to take her away from us.

Gabrielle told the truth about everything—in the police station and in court—and she never tried to unsay any of it. Not even later, when certain parties made it known in the form of
threatening letters and rocks through our windows that it might be safer, happier, and more profitable for her if she did.

I still don’t know where she comes from. We were walking home from school one afternoon and passed a shabby little carnival that had been set up in the neighborhood. She said that she used
to be able to see the Dragon Bamboo Slide at the Venice Pier from her bedroom window. But another time, she said she was from El Monte, and another time, she said South Gate.

Some secrets are too big to bury, some things can’t be hidden, but a girl is just about the right size.

My mother says that Gabrielle staying with us is temporary, but it’s been months now with no sign of things changing. I think my mother likes having two girls around the house again,
especially one who is coltish and sings and smiles a thousand-watt smile when she is happy. But Gabrielle is not Annie, and I hope that my mother is grateful for this, because I know that I am.
Gabrielle is pliant and easygoing, where Annie insisted on her own way. Gabrielle is airy and affectionate, but she’s also fragile in a way that Annie never was. She goes quiet sometimes, and
it looks as if a light has gone out inside her. My mother and I are still trying to figure out what works best when this happens. Sometimes talking helps. Sometimes it really doesn’t.

It’s just the three of us now. After my father was relieved of his duties at Insignia Pictures, he was relieved of them at home as well. My mother sent him packing, and to his credit, he
didn’t try to fight her. Unburdening his soul at the Hollywood Precinct about the things he’d done seemed to have left him a changed man.

At least for a few weeks.

Once it became clear that he’d actually face trial for his crimes, his guilty conscience began to have second thoughts. He’d worked Hollywood magic so many times before for his
troubled stars; now he began to conjure a little for himself. Nervous executives from Insignia Pictures materialized and began greasing palms, and just like that, the pandering charges were
dropped; nobody ever remembered my father going anywhere near Rex’s dirty-picture ring, and all that was left was one charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He got a couple
years of probation for that.

After that, his stock in Hollywood was reduced, but not ruined, and to a certain kind of movie studio, my father’s notoriety was something of a selling point. Last I heard, he’d gone
to work at Corinthian Films, where he does steady business pushing movies about women on chain gangs and the black-market baby trade.